Articulating Poland in colonial terms in German literature and visual media in the 19th century laid the groundwork for the long-standing framing of the relationship between Germany and its neighbor, ..
Articulating Poland in colonial terms in German literature and visual media in the 19th century laid the groundwork for the long-standing framing of the relationship between Germany and its neighbor, the colonizer and the colonized, until today, especially in German popular culture. My contribution explores the reection of the anxieties in German popular culture by analyzing the images of Polish migrant women in feature lms and series made for German television in the 2010s, in the first years after the opening of the German job market. I focus on the representations of the work of female migrants from Poland who perform domestic tasks and care work for children and seniors. My goal in this contribution is to examine popular images of Polish women as‘exotic’ maids, babysitters, and caregivers that discursively position Polish women as colonially-coded subalterns. My study focuses on the two TV productions, … und dann kam Wanda (...and then Came Wanda), dir. Holger Haase (2014) and the RTL’s 4-season series Magda macht das schon! (Magda Is Gonna Do It!) created by Sebastian Andrae (2017-2021).
